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Showing posts with label World War II. Show all posts
Showing posts with label World War II. Show all posts
Friday, September 22, 2017
HvS FAN CLUB | 70K Views
Wednesday, December 23, 2015
WW2 BOOKS | HvS Classic Jumps to #6 from #11 on Goodreads (Study Guides at End)
If I had been, I would have heralded the jump in the ranking of Hilda van Stockum's The Winged Watchman's before now.
- It used to be #11 out of 88 books.
- Now it is #6 out of 193 books.
If you, dear reader, are one of the people who voted for either of these books, thank you.
You may not know the history of The Winged Watchman. It was published in 1962 by Farrar Straus (which once wanted one of my books; I regret not having signed with them). It went through many editions and eventually went out of print. It was picked up by Bethlehem Books, which has sold about 51,000 copies in reprint.
My mother's estate, of which I am the executor, has retained movie and television rights. The Winged Watchman has been optioned twice for a movie and is currently being reviewed for a possible television miniseries.
The Winged Watchman I think is now the top-ranked book on Goodreads that has not yet been made into a feature-length or television movie.
A number of study guides seem to have sprouted up. I have discovered these for the first time. Here are four of them and a review with many comments.
Love2Learn
Study Questions for The Winged Watchman by Hilda Van ...
www.love2learn.net/literature/studyquestions/watchman.htm
Discussion/ Essay Questions: We are unable to supply an answer key to these study ...
Discussion/ Essay Questions: We are unable to supply an answer key to these study ...
Teachers Pay Teachers Mini-Guide
Mini-Guide for Middlers: The Winged Watchman... by ...
https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/.../Mini-Guid...
This is a mini-guide (a two-week literature study) for the book titled The Winged Watchman, by Hilda van Stockum.
Apr 9, 2002 - Seton Home Study School ... BOOK REPORT: The Winged Watchman ... give you the topic sentences for the five paragraphs to guide you.
Two Kid Schoolhouse
Two Kid Schoolhouse: Learning from, and learning to love ...
2kidschoolhouse.blogspot.com/.../learning-from-and-learning-to-love.ht...
Feb 1, 2009 - Using a study guide can add to your child's enjoyment of the book and ... Recently my boy read The Winged Watchman, a story about the Nazi ...
2015 Classic Children's Literature Event: The Winged ...
journey-and-destination.blogspot.com/.../2015-classic-childrens-literatur...
Jan 20, 2015 - The Winged Watchman by Hilda van Stockum and Bambi by Felix Salten .... to be very helpful in choosing the appropriate books for our study.
Order a copy of the new (October 2016) edition of The Borrowed House.
Sunday, February 8, 2015
WW2 | Intro. Boissevains in the Dutch Resistance (Book Draft) Why This Book?
What was it like to live in a country occupied by Hitler?
What was it like to fight back against the Nazis?
These questions are hard-wired into my head.
As a pre-teen in Montreal in the late 1940s, I heard my mother, Hilda van Stockum Marlin (1908-2006) and grandmother, Olga Emily Boissevain van Stockum (1886-1949) talk for hours about the tragedies of their Dutch relatives - those who died in World War II and those who survived only to envy the dead.
When they didn't want me to understand, they talked about in Dutch. But the pain in their voices etched an even deeper track in my head because I couldn't understand what the words meant. Dozens of relatives and friends died during the war. My grandmother lost both of her sons, my mother lost both of her brothers.
Years later, my mother wrote two books about the Dutch Occupation, fictionalized and targeted to a young adult age group. The books were based on facts she learned through letters from her relatives in Holland and from personal recollections.
The Dutch Occupation
In the 1930s, Hitler came to power in Germany. Despite Holland's neutrality in World War I and its wish to be neutral in World War II, he invaded Holland in 1940 with no warning. The tiny Dutch army, and private citizens, fought furiously. They are credited with shooting down 500 German planes during the opening days of the war - a relative writes that this number is probably understated.
But the Queen left Holland for England on May 13 (Friedhoff, 27) and when the Nazis obliterated central Rotterdam the next day with bombs (Friedhoff, 29-30), and threatened to follow up with Utrecht, the Queen capitulated on May 15. Only Zeeland held out until it, too, was bombed.
The Boissevain and van Hall Families
The Boissevains and their friends early on decided to be unwelcome to a "Deutschland Über Alles" in their midst. As the Nazi Occupation of Holland continued, an increasing number of family members joined the Resistance and many paid for their involvement with their lives or the lives of their parents, siblings and children. They were subject to betrayal and execution - weekly, daily, hourly. The leaders within the Boissevain family were from all age groups, women as well as men, old as well as young.
At the start, however, there was a period of "Phony Peace" (Friedhoff, 60) for a few weeks before Hitler's representative in Holland, Reichskommissar Arthur Seyss-Inquart, began showing his hand. During this time some members of the extended family made mistakes, some fatal. For example, for tax-allocation purposes there were lists of residents by religion that in retrospect should have immediately been burned as the Nazis invaded. The SS seized these lists as soon as they could, a terrible blow for Jews in Holland because all of these addresses were systematically visited. Later, the SS followed up with razzia roundups, neighborhood by neighborhood, house by house, so the lists only hastened the assembly of their deadly database.
From June 24 on, Seyss-Inquart proceeded to take away the rights of the occupied, one by one. With each new crackdown, the Resistance became more stubborn.
My mother told me of a Family Legend that Hitler said near the end of the war that "he should have exterminated all the Boissevains at the start of the Occupation of Holland". While when I first heard the story I was sure it was apocryphal, now I am now so sure. We know that Joseph Goebbels in his Diaries wrote confidently on September 8, 1943 that "Seyss-Inquart is a master in the art of alternating gingerbread with whippings" (Lochner). But later Goebbels admits:
Sources for this Chapter
de Jong, Louis, The Netherlands and Nazi Germany, Erasmus Lectures, 1988 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press).
Friedhoff, Herman, Requiem for the Resistance (1988)
Lochner, ed., Joseph Goebbels Diaries.
Nederland's Patriciaat 1988
Other Chapters
The outline of the book with links to other chapters is here.
What was it like to fight back against the Nazis?
These questions are hard-wired into my head.
As a pre-teen in Montreal in the late 1940s, I heard my mother, Hilda van Stockum Marlin (1908-2006) and grandmother, Olga Emily Boissevain van Stockum (1886-1949) talk for hours about the tragedies of their Dutch relatives - those who died in World War II and those who survived only to envy the dead.
When they didn't want me to understand, they talked about in Dutch. But the pain in their voices etched an even deeper track in my head because I couldn't understand what the words meant. Dozens of relatives and friends died during the war. My grandmother lost both of her sons, my mother lost both of her brothers.
- Willem van Stockum (1910-1944) was the pilot of an RAF bomber shot down during the week of D-Day, and was buried in France.
- Jan van Stockum (1913-1947) contracted tuberculosis in a Dutch hospital during the occupation and died in Heiloo, Netherlands.
Years later, my mother wrote two books about the Dutch Occupation, fictionalized and targeted to a young adult age group. The books were based on facts she learned through letters from her relatives in Holland and from personal recollections.
The Dutch Occupation
In the 1930s, Hitler came to power in Germany. Despite Holland's neutrality in World War I and its wish to be neutral in World War II, he invaded Holland in 1940 with no warning. The tiny Dutch army, and private citizens, fought furiously. They are credited with shooting down 500 German planes during the opening days of the war - a relative writes that this number is probably understated.
But the Queen left Holland for England on May 13 (Friedhoff, 27) and when the Nazis obliterated central Rotterdam the next day with bombs (Friedhoff, 29-30), and threatened to follow up with Utrecht, the Queen capitulated on May 15. Only Zeeland held out until it, too, was bombed.
The Boissevain and van Hall Families
The Boissevains and their friends early on decided to be unwelcome to a "Deutschland Über Alles" in their midst. As the Nazi Occupation of Holland continued, an increasing number of family members joined the Resistance and many paid for their involvement with their lives or the lives of their parents, siblings and children. They were subject to betrayal and execution - weekly, daily, hourly. The leaders within the Boissevain family were from all age groups, women as well as men, old as well as young.
At the start, however, there was a period of "Phony Peace" (Friedhoff, 60) for a few weeks before Hitler's representative in Holland, Reichskommissar Arthur Seyss-Inquart, began showing his hand. During this time some members of the extended family made mistakes, some fatal. For example, for tax-allocation purposes there were lists of residents by religion that in retrospect should have immediately been burned as the Nazis invaded. The SS seized these lists as soon as they could, a terrible blow for Jews in Holland because all of these addresses were systematically visited. Later, the SS followed up with razzia roundups, neighborhood by neighborhood, house by house, so the lists only hastened the assembly of their deadly database.
From June 24 on, Seyss-Inquart proceeded to take away the rights of the occupied, one by one. With each new crackdown, the Resistance became more stubborn.
My mother told me of a Family Legend that Hitler said near the end of the war that "he should have exterminated all the Boissevains at the start of the Occupation of Holland". While when I first heard the story I was sure it was apocryphal, now I am now so sure. We know that Joseph Goebbels in his Diaries wrote confidently on September 8, 1943 that "Seyss-Inquart is a master in the art of alternating gingerbread with whippings" (Lochner). But later Goebbels admits:
The Führer expects the Anglo-American invasion attempt to come in the Netherlands. We are weakest there, and the population would be most inclined to give the necessary local support to such an undertaking. As everyone knows, the Dutch are the most insolent and obstreperous people in the entire world. (Lochner, 434.)In the chapters that follow are prominent examples (parenthetical numbers preceded by NP are references to pages in the Nederland's Patriciaat 1988) of the people in the Boissevain and van Hall families who gave or risked their lives in pursuit of maximum insolence to Herr Hitler. The first chapter sets the stage on the close connections among the Boissevains and the van Halls and the clusters of houses in which they lived.
Sources for this Chapter
de Jong, Louis, The Netherlands and Nazi Germany, Erasmus Lectures, 1988 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press).
Friedhoff, Herman, Requiem for the Resistance (1988)
Lochner, ed., Joseph Goebbels Diaries.
Nederland's Patriciaat 1988
Other Chapters
The outline of the book with links to other chapters is here.
Sunday, May 19, 2013
WW2 BOOKS | Winged Watchman #6 (Updated Dec. 23, 2015)
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| Ranks 6th out of 193 books for children on World War II.. |
http://bit.ly/19SWY2E
 |
| World War II on the home front, in Washington. Ranks 27th out of 193. |
The Winged Watchman ranks 6th. It is about a family that lives in a windmill. Two boys– Doris aged 10 and Dirk Jan aged 14–are the heroes. The book is recommended for children and young adults in the 8-14 age range.
Here is what is posted as a review on Goodreads:
This acclaimed story of World War II is rich in suspense, characterization, plot and spiritual truth. Every element of occupied Holland is united in a story of courage and hope: a hidden Jewish child, an "underdiver," a downed RAF pilot, an imaginative, daring underground hero, and the small things of family life which surprisingly carry on in the midst of oppression.
The Borrowed House ranks 8th. It is about a German family that moves to Amsterdam,. The parents are there to entertain the troops. The daughter had been in Hitler Youth in Germany and is now in the midst of occupied Holland. She learns a lot, and decides that Hitler is a bad man. Based on a true story.
 |
| Ranks 8th out of 193. |
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